Wealth – Page 8 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

How Feminism Is Destroying The West, One Virgin At A Time

“Wait a minute. Connie Swail? Don’t you mean The Virgin Connie Swail?” – Dragnet (1987)

I slept with a rich girl who was a bit of a tramp once. Got lobsters.

I’ve had several posts about how sex and economics are intertwined more tightly than a bachelor weekend at Bill Clinton’s place. It is one of the more misunderstood parts of what is slowly destroying the family in the West. This, in turn, will gradually destroy the economics of the West. Without the culture of the West, the West effectively disappears.

This post will be pretty heavy on pictures and memes, almost all of which are as-found.

Let’s take a step back to 1776. I would love to do that in reality, and (in future posts) we’ll look to see how close we are to that. But back to the people that were there the first time. They were, mostly, pretty young. Sure, there were old dogs like Ben Franklin, but Jefferson was only 33. Madison, who would steer the Constitution to completion just over a decade later, was only 25.

Man, John Marshall must have had a hard 20 years on him.

Men were young (even though, yes, the paintings above weren’t done in 1776), yet doing amazing and important things. George Washington was 57 years old at his inauguration, which is astonishing since our likely presidential candidates in 2024 will be a combined 741 years old.

Back then, most men could find a woman and get married, sometimes once or twice (when wife 1.0 died in childbirth). This led to a certain stability, combined with the family economic structure. In this case, most families were Corporate Families – everybody worked, and everybody pitched in to keep things going. The reason that schools had spring breaks wasn’t to go to drink tequila in Cancun and go “woo” but to help plant. Summers were off to work the farm. And fall breaks were necessary for the harvest.

Kids were small farm implements, which is why families had lots of them. Divorces: uncommon. Religion: common.

Sadly, not a bikini graph.

In my lifetime, the Wilder Family has generally always existed in the tan area, including great-grandparents with a male breadwinner, though Great-grandpa and great-grandma McWilder ran an inn near a railroad where they only rarely killed and ate unsuspecting guests.

The golden age of the Male Breadwinner model was between 1900 and somewhere between 1960 and 1970. I’d note that around 1920 when women got the right to vote that the decline in Male Bread started, though it really began in earnest at the Great Depression.

At least Canada knows the score.

During World War II, there was a need for female labor as many men were given multi-year European and Pacific Island vacations. When the war was over, the decline continued at the same pace as the dual income model became the norm.

Until feminism and Leftism infected society at large leading to the steepest decline in stable family economic structures. This predated the economic decline of the United States, which I date to 1970-1973. Gee, I wonder if they could be related?

Now, Dual-Earner is the predominant economic model, with Female Breadwinner starting to make itself known.

New York Times Headline, 2025: Fathers’ Day: Women and Minorities Most Impacted.

Are there any economic or societal consequences to this change in the economic composition of the family? Why, yes. It’s killing society. It’s killing the kids.

The kids even have a name for it: No Girlfriend, No Work. There are other names, such as No Heir, No Work. It seems that young men have become utterly uninvested in society because they don’t have a girlfriend, nor the prospects of one. Things like Tinder® haven’t helped. As noted below, one young man was on Tinder® 3 and a half years. Nearly 40,000 swipes. 2 matches. Zero dates.

What? What’s going on?

In their youth, women are all fighting over the smallest number of men, the 9’s and 10’s. Since on a slow night, a 9 man will hook up with a 5, the 5 now thinks she’s worthy of at least a 9. Consider a 5 man?

No way.

This is not unique. This is not cultural. This is built into the innate preference of women to date up for offspring, and men to create as many offspring as they can. Here’s an example out of China (LINK) where an (American) teacher gave varying treats to a mixed class of boys and girls. On the first day, the girls got to pick first, and picked the best treats. The girls shared only with the two most popular boys, ignoring all of the rest. On the second day, the boys got to pick first, randomly. The treats were randomly distributed among the boys, so the girls interacted with all of the boys and everyone was happier.

When women pick, the distribution is (at least) skewed like the graph below, if not more skewed.

Most 22-year-old girls can have an 8+, if it’s 2am and the 8+ is drunk enough.

What are the results? Virginity in boys (not girls) is rising. Dating is going down among people who should definitely be dating.

As difficult as that is for guys, women use it as a golden ticket (again, in their early 20s) for fun and prizes:

But when these same women hit their thirties, the game is over. The 9s and 10s are either married to 9s and 10s, or they’re dating 22-year-olds. Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leo’s max age for dating is 25. And he’ll get 25-year-old 9s and 10s until he’s 75. Look at Al Pacino, who can barely walk:

I’m sure they’re super compatible, since she was born when he was only 53.

The woman who was in dozens if not hundreds of relationships in her 20s with the hottest of men will only settle in her mid to late thirties with a man who meets her qualifications. Those men who would have met those qualifications, being fit, making great money?

They’re married. They have kids, and that 5 (or less than 5) would rather be a drunken wine aunt then settle. Women use youth, beauty, and relative chastity to capture worthy men. If those are wasted on huge numbers of Chads? Off to the wine and cat farm with an empty womb. And the military will fight for that “right”, too.

I’m old enough to remember when the military was supposed to kill foreign enemies, not American babies.

Just like most things, this has a very, very simple solution. To be clear, the solution will be implemented when the circumstances require it. Oddly, the women will be happier, too. And we can finally stop listening to women complain about body shaming.

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families. I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then. Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it. The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings. They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner. The big difference was in flexibility. If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is. The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income. That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency. The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes. To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value. So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down. I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live. Ouch. One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason. I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad. This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction? Yeah. But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge.

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments. Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still. But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency. This is another one. It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades. There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith. Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot. In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income. But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence. This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control. When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent. This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one. I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades. It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man. The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution? Resilience.

Bud Light: “You Never Go Full Bud Light.” Ben And Jerry’s: “Hold My Beer.”

“Lt. Uhura, you’ve interrupted my song. I’m sorry, but there’ll be no ice cream for you tonight.” – Star Trek, TOS

I hear that they’re going to release their famous, “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler” flavor.

I think I might have had Ben & Jerry’s® ice cream once, probably 20 years or more ago. It was not especially memorable. I think the flavor was something like, Kill Those Who Worship Jesus Crunch, but I sure couldn’t taste the hate. It was more of a pistachio flavor.

I can certainly remember the first company that I said, “I’m not going to buy your stuff because you hate me”, and that was Levi Strauss & Co.© products, including anything made by Dockers™. Why? They committed to the abolition of private gun ownership sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s. Although I hadn’t heard the phrase BFYTW, it was my BFYTW moment. I resolved to not buy things from people who hated me.

Sadly, Levi’s® is still in business.

On Monday, I wrote about the Frankfurt School, a dedicated group of commies that dedicated their lives to destroying all that is good and wholesome in the world in order to replace it with soulless communism. I imagine they were great at parties. Monday’s post, rather, was about how there was a continual attack on the people of the West about their history.

The funny thing about being exposed to the idea that there are a group of people that hate America and all it stood for is that their power diminishes. Yeah, subtle propaganda still works even when you know about it, but in 2023 the propaganda is so unsubtle as to be confused with a Brawndo® ad.

It’s got what plants crave: it’s got electrolytes.

You can’t unsee the propaganda. And, you’re soaking in that propaganda. Here’s the latest two minutes hate, delivered right on time for your 4^th of July pleasure by Ben & Jerry’s™:

Ben and Jerry saw an ice cream truck in their neighborhood and ran it down. “What do you guys want?” “Nothing, we just wanted to tell you we’re vegan.”

Yeah, you read that right. They just Bug Lighted® themselves. They were trying to

I wandered over to the Twitter® comment section on this, and it was bloodier than people being stuck between Hunter Biden and a pile of cocaine. It was worse than that, even after you factor in the mass of venereal diseases that must be the only things holding Hunter’s underwear together. After looking through them at length, I found zero comments supporting whatever Leftist social media genius that they left with the password on July 3.

But social media from large conglomerates like Unilever®, which owns Ben & Jerry’s©, don’t do anything that isn’t planned. Bud Light’s® problems aren’t the result of some crazy person acting on their own. And Ben & Jerry™ intended this.

The virtue signal Ben & Jerry® was trying to light was one where Mount Rushmore would be given back to the American Indians that owned it. Of course, the American Indians who owned it killed a batch of previous American Indians to take it, and since the place around Mount Rushmore isn’t exactly the garden spot of the world, they were kicked out of a much nicer place.

It warmed my heart that some nice person asked the most relevant question: “Hey, Ben & Jerry’s®, why don’t you start?”

To me it’s like what I want to say to the government when they want me to give up my guns. “You first.”

The amazing part to me is that this has nothing at all to do with ice cream. It’s about projecting the woke values of a company owned by faceless corporate overlords to erase the history of the United States. It has nothing to do with ice cream, and everything to do with an agenda. After you see it, you can’t unsee it. I’ll just re-print the relevant Stonetoss:

Burgers?

Ben & Jerry’s©, and, by proxy their corporate overlords are selling hate. The hate? Against you. To be clear, this should come as a zero surprise since Ben & Jerry® hate you and want to erase you and your forefathers from history because you’re inconvenient to a business model that wants to sell only to nupeeple who are perfect economic units.

Heck, if they’re bored, they’ll remove American Indians from their products just to make nupeeple:

Is Land O’ Lakes® saying, “Keep the land, get rid of the Indians”?

Me? I’m hoping that Ben & Jerry’s® becomes Been Gone & Jerry’s©, an out of business ice cream company that was put out of business because it hated its customers and the country that made it. Then they can have Wilder Ice Cream©. Maybe I’ll make a flavor called Been Gone & Jerry’s™. That one gets most of its flavor from vanilla and me taking pleasure from Ben & Jerry’s® failing.

One Problem? People Who Don’t Want To Solve The Problem.

“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices. Yes sir. Here’s an example. It’s a 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, for sixty-two ninety-nine. That price . . . is too high.” (shoots the car) – Used Cars

But I hear he does know Tae Kwon Dough.

I’m amused that something called the “Inflation Reduction Act” has the same initials as the Irish Republican Army, but at the same time is a lot more destructive than the IRA ever was. The idea that solving inflation involves the government spending metric-Lizzo-Tons® of cash on boondoggles that will benefit Democratic donors is an idea that only someone with a child’s intellect could come up with, so at least we know what the Veep has been doing when she’s done with the construction paper for the day.

Here’s Brandon’s Tweet®:

I also hear he’s a fan of putting out fires by throwing more gasoline on them.

Don’t think this is a naked Leftist slush-pile for donors that will make Sam Bankman-Fraud’s scheme of taking American taxpayer dollars given to Ukraine and donating them after deposit to Leftist political schemes in the United States? This is bigger by far. And not only that, it’s being overseen by that paragon of virtue, John Podesta.

Yeah, that same John Podesta who on a scale of 1-10 for being creepy rates “Drag Queen Story Hour”.

As Podesta always says, “If you want you be a successful stalker, you must do the following.”

Green Energy isn’t about energy, it’s about the green. And the particular green in question is money. The alchemy that the Left wants to work is to give it to people and companies who give money to the Left. Hakuna Matata, the Circle Of Politics!

How does it work? Simple! Pay taxes, have the Left direct the money to people who support the Left. This is what they mean by “Our Democracy®” since the people involve in “Our©” don’t include you. Or me. They include people who support the Left, or can be bought to support the Left. Green (remember, that means money laundering) energy company Solyndra™ received over $535,000,000 in loans from Obama, and produced nothing but accounting irregularities.

This was actually the subject of the 1994 Nobel Prize® in Economics. I’m still waiting for one in blogging, and have my fingers crossed, but regardless, the idea was that if government could give everyone in the United States $1, it would be a much better deal for the political weasels to give three people $100 million. This is also the basis for every decision made in Congress.

Cats are better than dogs. Cats don’t work for the cops.

(Also, for the record, there is a Nobel Prize® for Literature, and if some nice reader would nominate me for a Nobel©, then I would be one of the very few nominated for both a Nobel™ and a Hugo®. Winning? Who cares, it’s an honor just to be nominated.)

The Nobel Prize™ was won by three dudes, one of which you might be familiar with: Graham John Nash, who also wrote Teach Your Children Well was played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Sorry about the confusion. I guess Graham is no Nash-trophysicist.

The result of this is a very, very unserious economy. Green Energy in most cases just means, “La-la-la I’m not listening, I can’t hear you because my fingers are in my ears, so the laws of thermodynamics do not exist and if they do, Congress can pass a law to change those laws” energy. Unserious.

I hear that there is now a way to make the turbine blades 99% recyclable (true!). All you have to do is chop them up into small pieces and ship them down to Louisiana where more energy than was used to create the blades is used to recycle them! What a win! (/sarcasm)

AOC’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti even let the mask slip and noted that the real goal of Green Energy policy. In his own words, according to Sam Ricketts, WaPo® reporter: “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.”

The entire economy. Why? Because they don’t like you. They want to funnel money to the people that give them the big shrimp parties, and give them money to put out ads so they can run again. The thing that fuels Washington, D.C. isn’t electricity. It is cash. And shrimp. And the quest for power – over you.

If we arrested all the corrupt politicians, who would we vote for in November of 2024?

The idea that solving the problems that we have with our economy is hard is laughable. Solving those problems is trivial. Really. Why does no one do it? Solving those problems is painful.

If solving them involves increasing the interest rates until the banks squeal, and some of them fail?
If solving them involves the destruction of entire portions of the economy only kept alive via corruption?
If solving them involves reducing the payments to those who could, but don’t contribute?
If solving them involves changing the rules so that people who game Wall Street rather than producing anything can’t rig the game?

Washington, D.C. won’t be for them, because they’d rather let a paper cut turn into an amputation than make any decision that will stop the shrimp parties with the beautiful people who are just rubbing their hands at the idea of an “Inflation Reduction Act”.

Tucker Carlson And The Corrupt Biden Banana Republic

“Wow. Anybody watching must’ve thought this was a negative reality inversion.” – The Young Ones

Jenner might join the Marvel® movie universe – I hear they’re casting for ex-men.

I lost a job once, not because I didn’t do what my boss asked me to do, but because I wouldn’t tell him I thought just like he did.

When he asked me to do something that wasn’t illegal or immoral or fattening or didn’t violate my principles, I’d do it since that’s the definition of “boss”. But no. He wanted me to admit that my opinion was wrong. I refused.

My opinion is mine. I’ll do (mostly) what the boss says at work, but there is nothing that will make me give up my soul. And telling him I agreed with him when I didn’t was a gulf I couldn’t cross, because my virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.

Why did Tucker Carlson get sidelined by Fox®? I think it’s a business model. I cut the cable some time ago, and hadn’t watched Fox News™ for quite a while, mainly because they seemed to be, like Sean Hannity, just a spear carrier for whatever the message is that he was supposed to carry that particular day – he never had an original idea, and his commentary was so between the lines that he was being the television equivalent of a Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy or a bucket of warm spit.

But since they fired Tucker? Wow. Maybe I just missed his evolution, but since he’s been at Tucker on Twitter™ he’s thrown out bomb after bomb, right on target with some of the most cogent and, dare I say, dangerous analysis of anyone with a major media voice.

I think Tucker is singlehandedly killing cable news, the MSNBCNN® model of cable news was long on the verge of death, and Tucker now has more views on a single Twitcast® than all of cable news, plus probably most television shows. Combined. That’s the power of the Truth.

What’s the difference between the FBI and the CIA? Acronyms. Plus, one killed JFK and the other killed MLK.

I had long talked about inversion. It wasn’t me who coined that term, and it’s been long enough that I can’t remember where I first saw it – probably Vox Day was the one that brought it to my attention using the idea of Satanic Inversion – take a virtue, invert it, and glorify it.

It really defines a lot of what we see today. My parents taught me that humility was a virtue. The inversion? Pride. What is June? Oh . . . an inversion. My parents taught me that chastity was a virtue (to be fair, I did my best to actively not be chaste when I was in high school because drive-in movies were still a thing) but now the virtue is indulgence. If it feels good, it must be right.

Certainly, there are no trails of childless women who pursued meaningless hookups in their 20s and then found that, their youth and innocence spent, that they were incapable of finding a decent man.

Oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened.

If those women did find a decent man, they were so addled by the mindless sex that they’d had that they were incapable of bonding into a proper relationship. They found themselves doomed to single motherhood or the life of a lonely, bitter spinster or in a relationship where they might become bored in an afternoon and blow it up for the dream of a man that had dominated them when they were 22.

I wonder what the bikini waxer will say to her when she’s sixty?

Virtues are virtues for a reason. They matter, and when we toy with them, we toy with the very foundations of civilization itself.

When it comes to economics, the virtue was to save and be frugal and build. Now? The virtue is to be like BlackRock® and, well, say things like, “It’s not who the president is – it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president,” and “You’ve got $10,000? You can buy a senator,” and, “War is real f*****g good for business.” Don’t’ believe me? Here it is in the words of someone who works for Blackrock™.

To be clear, BlackRock® has $9,000,000,000,000 in assets that they manage. So, they can crush anyone they want to like a bug. Don’t like something someone says? With spare pocket change they can buy the company that person works at, and have them fired.

Which might explain Tucker’s recent free time. In Tucker’s latest video, he talks about “inversion” of morality. I have zero hubris to think he’s reading me, but the fact that the concept has made it to a person that can get 100,000,000 views a video means we’re winning.

And BlackRock® will loose a few hundred million on Fox™. I think they have that in their couch cushions.

It also explains the reason that Tucker got sidelined. Blackrock® owns 15.1% of Fox Corp.®, the parent of Fox News©. If you want to buy a president, it makes sense to own the news. They also own 12% of CNN™. And 13% of Comcast™ which owns MSNBC®, NBC™, CNBC©, and Sky®.

BlackRock™ wants to own the media. I mean, with $9 trillion they can control the media, own what Tucker says (if he works for them) and get all the war they want, because, in the words of their own employee, “War is real f*****g good for business.”

That? That sounds exactly like an inversion of values to me. Getting rid of Tucker had nothing to do with anything but this: he was against war, which as probably really f*****g bad for business at parasite companies like BlackRock©, who produce nothing but profit from every misery on Earth while cloaking it in the preening moral finery of people who worship at the Leftist inversion values of “Environmental (Live in the pod, eat the bugs!), Social (Illegals are good for business!) and Governance (I get to choose the incompetent people on the board who never would have gotten a board seat without me).

We are faced with a world where the inversion of values is celebrated, and actual, real values and virtue are hated.

Case in point? Hunter Biden. Real people who are caught on camera with handguns doing crack do time – hard time in federal prisons. Income tax issues? Ditto – the one thing Uncle doesn’t like is shorting him on his part of the take, yet Hunter gets a pass.

He seems happy. I wonder if he got childrens’ hair to sniff for Fathers’ Day?

But Hunter? Hunter will keep selling his fake art for hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who allegedly want favors from his father after selling exactly zero alleged expertise to Ukrainians and Chinese for allegedly tens of millions of dollars that he allegedly funneled to “the big guy”. Allegedly.

Thankfully, the media is all over this.

What? They’re all owned by BlackRock™ who thinks “War is real f*****g good for business”? And the media is silent about what is likely the biggest corruption scandal in the very history of the country?

Inversion.

The very wonderful thing about this is that it won’t stand. It can’t stand. Not because we’re powerful, but because the inversion of virtue brings, ultimately, the inversion of prosperity and success.

The way to prosper financially in this environment is to give over to the inversion and engage in all of the inverted virtues that firms like BlackRock™ take as their sacrament and holy scripture.

The success, though, is fleeting. The cost is high. Think Joe Biden looks at the perverted wasteland of his family and feels any pride? Well, bad example, since Joe traded his metaphorical (and maybe literal) soul long ago and probably the strongest emotion he feels in 2023 is the desire to have his tapioca pudding at exactly 11:45AM.

Joe must be so proud.

But if I ascended the highest halls of power, and saw my progeny was as decadent and useless as Hunter, I would know that I had failed at my most fundamental duty as a father. And if I looked at the country and saw the destruction I had created, I would know that I was a failure as a leader. Despite all of my power, I would know that it would have profited me little to have gained the whole world, having lost my soul.

Looks like Tucker understands that, too. He’s playing a game on the big stage, and naming those who are inverting everything of value, everything that has brought harmony and goodness to the country. He could just sit in his basement with tens of millions of dollars, which is just what BlackRock© wants him to do, because that would be real f*****g good for business.

I guess Tucker decided he wouldn’t give up his soul.

So, Tucker decided he would fight. Because virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.

Choose. But Choose Wisely.

“Yeah, yeah, it came in the shape of a bottle? We’re from the Kingsman tailor shop in London. Maybe you’ve heard of us.” – Kingsman, The Golden Circle

During COVID they said I needed to wear a mask and gloves to go shopping. They lied. Apparently I needed clothes, too.

There was a time in my life when I had to make a choice. It was a dark time for me. Let me give some background. Please, everyone pretend that there’s a swirling motion and fuzzy stuff as we go back in time . . . to a land before cell phones and Google®.

In my first semester at college, I did pretty well. I studied for a few hours and got a 3.4 at a college that had the reputation as being the toughest one in the state. Life was good. I believe that I spent more time with Coors Light™ that semester than I spent studying calc, physics, or chemistry.

My second semester wasn’t the same.

In my first three tests (within the first two weeks of the semester) I got three Fs. These were the first three Fs I had ever gotten in my life on tests.

Ever.

They asked me to describe failure in two words. I replied, “I can’t.”

They weren’t horrible Fs, but the percentages were all in the 50s, except for physics 2 which was in the 40s. To be fair, the average score for the physics 2 test for all students was in the 50s – physics 2 was a designated “weed out” course.

Right before spring break, I had midterms. I didn’t know the scores that I had gotten on the next tests, but spring break was not fun. I had a full ride scholarship, and it required that I keep my grades above a certain GPA for both semester and cumulative to keep the scholarship.

Yikes. Do you mean there are consequences for my actions?

For the first time in my life, I was looking real failure in the face. It was the long, dark, Kobayashi Maru of the soul.

I got 8 out of 10 on my driver’s test. Two jumped out of the way.

I sat on the hood of my car at the end of spring break for a few hours at an Interstate rest stop under the gentle spring Sun, still hours away from the school. I figured I had two options:

Go back to school and tough it out. Nine more weeks of hell, and no promise that I’d do any better than I had done in the first nine, but if I did, it would mean studying harder than I ever had studied anything, except those times I studied the rare illicit Playboy® that came into my hands.
Drive north. It was before there was much of a border, and I could just drive into Canada, get a knit hat. I already knew the language, I could say “aboot” and “take off, eh” as well as anyone. I had a Visa® with a $500 limit, and a car that was owned free and clear, I had half a can of Copenhagen®, and I was wearing sunglasses. I could drive to Saskatchewan and become a lumberjack. Yes, this was my backup plan, even though I’m not sure Saskatchewan even has trees.

After a long time thinking, I . . .

There are several strategies in life, just like there are several strategies in a supermarket. Oh, sure, I could shop like everyone normally does here in Modern Mayberry and cover my nipples in yogurt while I’m in the dairy aisle (because nipple yogurt is free here), but I’m not talking about the shopping part, I’m talking about checking out.

The first option is to pick a line and stick with it, even if the lady in front of me has 43,238 coupons and price matches every item on the sale flyer from the competing grocery store and ends up getting $983,365.55 worth of groceries for $1.98 plus a raincheck for sour cream. For the nipples, you know, if you’re allergic to the yogurt.

What’s the most important culture in the world? Agriculture.

Okay, that’s not a great option, because every other line in the grocery store will cycle 43 times while the lady does one checkout and the clerk silently fantasizes about going home for a few gallons of gin.

Option 2 is a different one. In this one, I could flit from line to line like a politician being:

against gay marriage during election season
to being for gay marriage in special circumstances when election is comfortably far away
to being silent before election season
to sponsoring mandatory hormone treatment for toddlers because toddlers can’t consent to choosing their gender.

Yeah. While that might get a politician lots of money and votes, it just gets me moving from a stopped line to a moving line that stops as soon as I get in it and I don’t even get appointed as an ambassador to the Swedish Bikini Team.

I sold my Swiss watches to a friend in Mexico. Adios, Omegas!

Option 3, however, is probably the sanest one. Look around for the best line. If the coupon lady gets in, or there’s a price check, or the clerk is obviously on some sort of depressant medication because they’re not at home drinking a few gallons of gin, move to the next best line.

In my career, I jumped lines a couple of times. My first job was into an industry that was in the middle of a slump in the region I lived. So, I jumped. In this case, I jumped to an entirely different industry, and had a pretty good career. When that industry slumped, I jumped again, and then jumped back.

All of the jobs were basically related, except if you looked at them from the inside – they were all different. The combination of those experiences led me to a career that turned out to be a pretty good one, though there is the possibility that if I had jumped one fewer time, it would have been even more lucrative.

Or not. I might have ended up as a clerk who was missing their evening gin. I’m not going to worry that I might have done better if I had or hadn’t jumped a line, because life is far too short for that type of regret.

Also?

I’m going to try to not let the choices I’ve made in the past make me too timid. As many of the readers here, there are likely more years behind me than ahead, and it’s far too early to stop trying to kick a dent in the Universe, which in itself requires risk. I may win, I may lose, but I’m still in the game.

Looking back, I’m fairly happy with the progression that developed from my choices. And it’s because I stayed in line at the first opportunity to jump: college.

I made a paper airplane that wouldn’t move. I guess the problem was that I used stationary.

Back to that Interstate rest stop, far away in time and space . . . . (imagine the swirly thing again)

After a long time thinking sitting on the hood of my car on that warm spring day so many days ago, I decided that I could pack up my stuff and go up to Saskatchewan any time to be a lumberjack, even at the end of the semester if things didn’t work out. I could also take the time to learn if there were trees there or if I would have to fight the beavers for maple syrup so I could be strong when the wolves come.

But I only had one shot to try to see if I could dig myself out of the hole that I had made for myself.

I did. I got two Cs and a D – the best-looking D (and still the only D) that I’ve ever had in my life. My scholarship was safe. The semester after that one was okay, and then every semester after that I got great grades. I had learned that I could come back from failure, and though I changed lines later a time or two, I decided to see if this line would move for me because I was only risking failure, and only risking nine more weeks of my life. The line moved.

In life, pick your line. Move when you need to. And realize that the choice is yours.

Survival Economics, 2023

“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie

I tried farming rabbits, but I found it a hare-raising experience. All memes this post, as found.

Perhaps the single biggest concern I have is that we’re spending our time as a species worried about trivial stuff. What “trivial stuff”? How about Ukraine? I think that’s what Kamala and Brandon would want us to focus on, but they’re stuck on vodka and sniffing children.

Ukraine? I don’t have a side in that conflict, and steadfastly refuse to have one. Both governments are at about the same level of totalitarianism (this isn’t me talking, this is from those organizations who measure this stuff). I’m not going to get into it, but I can back my ambivalence up that, yeah, both sides are crap. If Trump had a second term? This conflict wouldn’t exist. We still wouldn’t have a wall, but this conflict wouldn’t exist.

But Ukraine is trivial compared to the subjects everyone is avoiding:

Food, and Energy. I originally had a third, Immigration to add to this list, but the post got too long on just the first two. Of course, I’ll get to immigration. Sometime. Just like the US Border Patrol.

Let’s start with Food.

The Earth does have a finite food supply – I can prove this because sometimes the shake machine doesn’t work at McDonald’s®. There is only so much food that can be created. It’s large – world hunger is a solved problem at the current population level of the Earth. We have more people than ever, and we have food to feed absolutely everyone on Earth as long as everyone doesn’t want the Stuffed Crust® pizza. Sure, not everyone is getting filet mignon at every meal, but we have, on an absolute basis, enough calories to make sure that no one on Earth right now needs to starve.

Amy Schumer is proof of that, though I’ve heard she’s happy there’s a ban on harpooning whales.

That’s a big deal. This is the first era in the history of life on the planet that we can say that no person on Earth needs to be hungry. The biggest basketcase has generally been Africa, primarily because they tend to kill each other by the bucketload because it’s Tuesday and don’t have mountains and winter.

What?

Yeah, mountains and winter. I can’t stop Tuesday from showing up.

Mountains catch snow, and snow, melting as the summer hits, keeps the rivers flowing. The reservoirs across the United States are, in effect, artificial mountains that keep the rivers flowing when the snow isn’t there. This also keeps a minimum amount of water flowing when the rivers would otherwise run dry so I can skip stones.

While this increases the transport opportunities available due to rivers that makes transportation cheap, it also has the most important benefit of making agriculture predictable. This makes sure that although there are good years and bad years, those are the exceptions everywhere but Africa. In Africa, the lack of mountains makes a good year and a bad year a random and unpredictable event. In a world without Western Civilization this is a famine event. In a world with the evil Western Colonialists, it means that there’s food available and nobody has to die, unless the UN has a voice.

When you average it out over the globe, however, there’s more than enough food in 2023 and the problem for most farmers in the West is that food is too cheap and too plentiful. The only thing that stops distribution is kleptocracy – I read that European farmers can make milk, turn it to powder, and ship that powdered milk to Africa cheaper than Africans can produce milk. This never gives the locals the ability to create a viable farm industry. Except if Bill Gates gets involved:

In 2023, the problem isn’t too little food, it’s too much.

Yet the impulse from the Left is to:

Destroy Western farming because of muh climate change,
Implant the idea that we must eat bugs because (rolls dice) communism and muh climate change, and
Make all of this subject to the most stringent regulation, because that makes the Left sexually stimulated.

Even rice isn’t immune from the rage of the Left.

Just letting everyone know, she’s over 18, so perhaps someone can throw themselves on this grenade and wife her up, which might shut her up.

What people seem to miss is that this oasis in time where everything is going well. We have

the technology to maximize crop yields,
the oil to power the machines to plant the crops,
the natural gas to create the fertilizer to nourish the crops, and
the land with the topsoil to produce the crops.

It’s clear that, despite The Mrs. being able to make a few strawberries a week from a flower pot, we can’t feed the world from one. There is a finite limit to the production of food, and it’s very tight.

And, like every other thing on the list, we’re not serious about it. California had a plan in the 1970s to create a series of reservoirs to give them water in amounts required to avoid droughts. They ignored it, and now California is like a teenager, “It’s too wet. It’s too dry. I want to live in a mall.” They weren’t serious about it.

And food? One side, the Left, wants to reconfigure man and have them live in pods and eat bugs. The other side, the Right, wants people to be free and many of them eat steak. I’m not having trouble picking a side here, though the Leftist mind control has convinced the Zoomers that they can live via osmosis, or something:

The point is, no adults are looking at this problem, and the deluded Leftists that are looking at it fall to the same sad solution they have for every problem: Live in the Pods, Eat the Bugs. People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

Energy is not much better.

Just like reservoirs are artificial mountains, huge piles of lithium and batteries and infrastructure and expensive cars that sometimes let all of their electrical energy turn kinetic after a fender bender isn’t the answer. It’s because the Leftists aren’t serious.

Let’s take a big picture look:

Oil is awesome. It powers everything from jet fighter planes to rockets to that mysterious fire that burned down . . . oh, I’ve said too much. It has been the primary fuel of the Western world since 1930 or so.

And it’s cool, mainly because oil is just concentrated solar power, and all of the work in making it is based on solar power. I mean, solar in the sense that the Sun shined millions of years ago, and we’re using concentrated Sunlight from when the dinosaurs were making frozen gelato and rubbing sunscreen on their nipples in their spare time.

(Yes, I know that dinosaurs didn’t have nipples, but I rarely use nipples, and want to be known as the man who popularized dinosaur nipples. Sue me.)

Oil is a gift. But, like the ability of Aerosmith® to make good songs, it’s limited. Oh, sure, it can produce billions of gallons of gasoline, but eventually it’s going to give you a Janie’s Got a Gun and then everyone will be disappointed and then everyone will notice that Stephen Tyler looks like their lesbian aunt.

I love oil. But it is finite, and by the time this century ends, it will be the fuel of the past. Sadly, we don’t have a replacement in sight at this point other than nuclear power or Leftism’s failures.

One way to produce nuclear power.

Windmills won’t work because the wind is fickle and electricity hard to store. The Sun is perfect, if we have millions of years to store its wonderful energy in sweet, sweet hydrocarbons, but solar panels installed in 2000 are already starting to fill up California’s landfills. We could count on Kamala’s stupidity, but eventually the vodka will run out and potatoes run on solar power.

All of my research shows that the “science” of “climate change” means the same solution is the same as food: People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

No. We need the free market. But we also need a plan. Sure, I hate government plans, but the signals of the market are silly – if the price of oil rises, there will be more.

No. We cannot conjure oil out of a free market if it isn’t there. We do have to plan for a future after oil, not for the sake of climate, but for the sake of humanity. And, though I am certain of few things, I am certain that Kamala and Brandon are not up for this task.

The solution to this problem is different than most, since it must take place before the problems that will doom billions. Or it won’t. And billions will be doomed, and mankind’s dream of going to the stars will be turned into mankind’s dream of dinner at Taco Bell®.

Pretty sure this is a parody. But in 2023, who can tell?

Beer, Bad Movies, and Bathing Suits – Ending Woke One Dollar At A Time

“Why have you disturbed our sleep; awakened us from our ancient slumber?” – The Evil Dead

Yesterday I had a nightmare that my Facebook® account was deleted. When I woke up, for just a second, I was really scared that I had a Facebook™ account.

It’s happening.

Despite the Left fully holding the levers of most of the power in the country, the one thing they didn’t seem to count on was a people that they pushed too far. Historically, they’ve always pushed too far and outpaced the populace, at least in European or Western nations. It’s like The Mrs. trying to get me to do chores. Don’t push, I told you last year I’d get those socks picked up.

In France after the Revolution, it ended with Napoleon – a strong man to push back the insanity of the Terror. In Germany, after the public revolted after the (failed) communist revolution, the economic destruction of the 1920s and the unbridled degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, to, well, you know what happened.

Stalin managed to take a gun after taking power and shoot everyone to the left of him, setting himself up as the single source of communist thought (well, after also taking an icepick to a rival living in Mexico), which I’ve heard referred to as the Leftist Singularity. It’s like the old joke, “Robespierre and Trotsky walk into a bar. There are no survivors.”

An example of the Leftist Singularity in action. All memes (from here on, including this one) are “as-found.”

Leftism is inherently unstable since it nearly invariably ends up feeding on itself. The college Leftist poets are despised by the “real” Leftists. Real communism has been tried, and every single time the results are the same. But this time, will it be different?

The grounds for a bit of optimism is that the American consooomer seems to have started voting with their wallets and is refusing to consooom the Woke products.

Disney™ has lost nearly a decade of growth in stock price, and has lost half of its value since 2021.

Disney© is the source of endless corporate cultural rot. Brought about as a child and American friendly company, it now openly panders to people who want to push sex-change surgery to kids. The result is oddly predictable – the people who have kids don’t want to take their kids to a movie to have their values subverted. Bud Lightyear™ was a character that everyone loved. Disney™ solution? Inject LGBTQIABIPOC+ into the movie. Result? Parents avoided it, and it was a huge money loser.

I’m thinking this might be the secret Disney™ corporate strategy?

Inject values about woke female empowerment? Everyone stops going to their movies because their movies are now boring because it would disrupt The Narrative if a woman had to learn something, if a woman had to struggle, if a woman ever had to be saved by a man, and if a woman wasn’t the best one ever at whatever she chose to do, the first time out. Huh. I’m thinking my ex-wife might be a big Disney™ fan.

Seriously, Disney® managed to make Star Wars™ boring and devoid of wonder, all in the name of Woke.

Oops.

I’m thinking some prankster changed the numbers on the sign, but if you notice, all that Bud® is still sitting there.

Bud Light® is now down over 25% in sales.

That’s devastating to the bottom line, and I won’t go into the story in too much depth because it’s pretty fresh in everyone’s mind. But what’s not fresh is the beer, since it’s rotting on the shelf and I heard today Bud™ is now having to buy it back, and corporate is having to buy dusty, expired cases back. To make it even more amusing, now the LGBTWTF groups have disavowed Bud™, making them about as popular as polio or monkey pox, depending on the group.

Ooops.

Target® sold “tuck-friendly” female bathing suits, plus a line of “pride” clothing for kids.

Why is Target™ in the business of sexualizing our kids? In the “how could it get worse?” files, it turns out that one of the clothing designers for Target’s™ “Pride” line is featured in a shirt noting that “Satan respects pronouns.” Plus, well, look at him – nothing about him says, “safe to leave kids with,” and a lot that says, “voted most likely in high school to be found to own a house with a crawlspace filled with bodies.”

Target® is feeling the heat. They’ve reportedly (in at least some stores, crunched all the “pride” material into the back of the store into smaller sections. Apparently, this is mainly in the South, though stories are conflicting. Since Gavin Newsom has solved all of California’s problems and successfully revitalized San Francisco and stopped street pooping, he has taken the time to show great concern that one store stopped, under public pressure, selling propaganda materials.

Ooops.

It’s afraid.

I think this is what scares the Left. The idea that people will rise up without ever even talking to each other and destroy the companies that force-feed the populace a diet of propaganda and Woke. It starts small, with a beer. Now, at least some companies are backing off the idea of Woke.

Will this stop the Left?

No. I think they’re filled with hubris, and can’t see the real danger that they’re provoking, and the inevitable backlash as children become the targets of sexual predators is going to be stronger than all the Diversity Inclusion and Equity that BlackRock™ can extort. The backlash will end up in a predictable place . . . with a predictable reaction if we don’t stop it before it goes too far.

Now this is the kind of transitioning I can support.

Do we win? Yes I, I’m sure we will. This month? No. Next month? No. But people are awakening, learning that this is money we don’t have to pay to them, that this is a game we don’t have to play, that we don’t have to give them the minds and souls of our children, which in the end is what will end Woke.

FYI, friend in from out of town, might not have a post on Friday.

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano? Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain. The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak. We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this. I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what. Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk. Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint: the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope. We took pictures. If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it. The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean. The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up. Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill. To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep. Really steep. Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different. The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow. The solution?

Glissading. Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”. Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”. The way we glissaded was to:

Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain. I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it. We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society. To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years. Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends. An example? The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day. There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on. Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great. But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth? I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000. I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit. Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped. People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward. In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff. With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth. And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left. I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie. I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call. Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West. What’s going wrong? Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
Declining heritage American birthrates,
Declining two-parent families,
Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
Increasing de facto censorship,
Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb. Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny. Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse. And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it. But all of them together? We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West. These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline. Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope. If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West. We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall. I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger. What will we lose? The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life. Give the West hardship? We shine. When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more. That’s okay. The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists. The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1^st, so long ago? It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.